I will start by saying I have always thought of the Renegade as one of those unrecognized and forgotten gems of the era. To me this was one of Bill Shaw's best designs during the period and is one of my favorite 27 footers of the era. I read the prior posts and looked at a couple of the links above and would like to comment on a few things and provide a little bit of clean-up.
1) The Renegade was designed by Bill Shaw and not Bill Tripp.
2) Several articles mention that the Renegade was a CCA design. It may have raced under the CCA and was designed in the CCA era, but the boat appears to have been optimized for the MORC rule of the day, which produced much more well rounded designs than the CCA. Bill Shaw was active in the founding of the MORC and in developing the MORC rule. He came to national fame through his work on the MORC rule and remained a proponent through much of his early career. The more proportionately longer water line length, the vertical and proportionately wide transom, more powerful hull sections, and the amount of headroom provided were hallmarks of the MORC rule. (The waterline length, hull sections, and transom would have hurt the boat's rating under CCA.)
3) You can't just design your own interior and place things wherever you want to functionally. Any new layout needs to be engineered to maintain the weight distribution required to keep the boat sitting on her lines, and .to provide the structural reinforcing needed for the rig loads and attachment points.
To explain, it is not always obvious that the interior design of a boat was designed with specific weight distributions in mind. While in reality, the designer somewhat back engineers this, meaning that they do a table of weights for the boat that lists the weight of each fixed object and the location fore and aft and side to side of the centerline of the boat. The net result of those calculations will provide the overall weight of all of the fixed items on the boat, and center of gravity fore and aft and side to side. The overall weight of the fixed items is subtracted from the design displacement of the boat and the difference is used to determine the weight of the ballast. The placement of the ballast is determined to place the center of gravity of the ballast so it brings the center of gravity of the entire boat into line with the center of buoyancy. Items are moved side to side to keep the boat from listing. The issue of balance is much more critical on small boats than bigger boats which are more tolerant of moving moderate weights around the boat.
If the intent is to design a completely different interior then you would need to essentially back engineer the original design, calculating the weight and weight distribution of the designed interior to locate the center of gravity of the boat as designed (You can skip the hull, deck, rig and ballast if you are not altering those items), and then calculate the weights and locations of all of the items in the new design to try to end up close to your calculation of the original weight and center of gravity.
Similarly boats of this era had very little internal framing. What little internal framing that they had existed in the form of bulkheads and knees. Often the structure that served as shroud attachment points were disguised as a shelf support or the shelf itself, or might simply be a locker or head bulkhead. Hull stiffeners were often bunk flats and shelves. If you take glassed in elements out of the boat, then alternate means of reinforcement need to be developed and engineered for the loads.
Jeff
